"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

All candidates are backed by shadowy billionaires, though to be fair his campaign spending didn't exactly demonstrate that. And why would this be scary? He destroyed a senior Republican representative and reduced his state's seniority to zero. Nobody is going to listen to him, he is powerless. And now, so is Eric Cantor.

Adolf Oliver Nipples:All candidates are backed by shadowy billionaires, though to be fair his campaign spending didn't exactly demonstrate that. And why would this be scary? He destroyed a senior Republican representative and reduced his state's seniority to zero. Nobody is going to listen to him, he is powerless. And now, so is Eric Cantor.

I don't know who is backing Brat if anyone but all the money spent on an anti-immigration PSAs didn't get captured in the campaign funding comparisons between Cantor and Brat. It is almost impossible to figure which money went where anymore but to say Brat's $200K (?) was what he beat Cantor with is naive to say the least.

DjangoStonereaver:"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

DjangoStonereaver:"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

I remember leaving this gem on an Audible "recommendation" of Atlas Shrugged on my Facebook page. Wow, do Randians get easily hurt.

Zik-Zak:DjangoStonereaver: "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

I remember leaving this gem on an Audible "recommendation" of Atlas Shrugged on my Facebook page. Wow, do Randians get easily hurt.

Randianism (or as they like to call it, Objectivism) is for all practical purposes a cult. They think they understand everything about how the world works, and anything that contradicts their "understanding" is automatically dismissed as blasphemy.

Zik-Zak:DjangoStonereaver: "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

I remember leaving this gem on an Audible "recommendation" of Atlas Shrugged on my Facebook page. Wow, do Randians get easily hurt.

The downside of being a sexy industrious super-genius and role model for independent thought/living is that you have very delicate feels.

Everything in the article seems to be true but the conclusion that it wasn't a surprise that Brat won the election is not a sound one.

They were probably grooming him for a Washington elected post but I think this was more of a trial run that they didn't think they would have actually won. Otherwise they would have pumped more money in.

Let me get this straight: this was a victory for the millioniares and billioniaires on the right like the Koch Bros. because somebody who shares some of their views had made a grant to a university that enabled it to hire Brat as a professor, who spent less money on his entire campaign than Kantor did at steak houses, and whose number 1 donor was an auto body shop.

So if you want friends who rationalize callousness and stinginess, have at them. They're easy to find as they plaster helpful bumper stickers to identify them. As if they voluntarily complied in a country-wide tracking program. ;)

What has worked with Koch backed candidates is much of there money is given goes to getting out to the voters. Meaning the pay or get volunteers to walk to neighborhoods, collect mail in ballots for voters who haven't voted, reach out to the demographics that vote such as older people. Also I am sure getting the candidate's church goers to support him helps too. Less is spent on sucking up to wealthy doners because with deep Koch pockets got "getting out to the people" part of the campaign is covered. Money is nice but votes win elections.

Let me get this straight: this was a victory for the millioniares and billioniaires on the right like the Koch Bros. because somebody who shares some of their views had made a grant to a university that enabled it to hire Brat as a professor, who spent less money on his entire campaign than Kantor did at steak houses, and whose number 1 donor was an auto body shop.

9/11 truthers have more going for them.

As was pointed out above, PAC spending of the "non-coordinating" kind doesn't show up as candidate spending. I have no idea how much was spent on anti-Cantor ads by people/PACs that were not directly Brat-linked.

Or how much spending of that kind was undertaken by pro-Cantor PACs, for that matter. Perhaps someone from the area could tell us what TV has been like in recent weeks in terms of political ads.

BMFPitt:He is now, or he was before and the billionaires only gave him like $5 since he spent basically nothing on his primary campaign?

Does he have lots of steakhouse money now?

Meanwhile, according to New York Magazine, Allison gave $500,000 to Randolph-Macon College to hire Dave Brat, so that he too could teach the Ayn Rand libertarian philosophy as an economics professor.

Apparently he couldn't get by on actual knowledge of economics, which according to common sense seems violently opposed to Randian philosophy. Apparently the Cato institute has to stack economics faculties with idiots in a vain attempt to make Objectivism look sane.

BMFPitt:UrukHaiGuyz: Has anyone with significant wealth ever publicly "gone Galt". Were they missed if so?

Howard Hughes sort of did, but that was more of a psychotic break.

I think that to be considered "going Galt", intent matters, so Howard Hughes's psychotic break doesn't count.

Off the top of my head, I seem to remember that the director of the first "Atlas Shrugged" movie threatened to go Galt after it tanked in theaters. I don't recall if he eventually came back to direct the remaining two movies or if he was replaced (probably the latter, since the entire cast was different in all three movies). Either way, nobody seemed to miss him.

mrshowrules:Adolf Oliver Nipples: All candidates are backed by shadowy billionaires, though to be fair his campaign spending didn't exactly demonstrate that. And why would this be scary? He destroyed a senior Republican representative and reduced his state's seniority to zero. Nobody is going to listen to him, he is powerless. And now, so is Eric Cantor.

I don't know who is backing Brat if anyone but all the money spent on an anti-immigration PSAs didn't get captured in the campaign funding comparisons between Cantor and Brat. It is almost impossible to figure which money went where anymore but to say Brat's $200K (?) was what he beat Cantor with is naive to say the least.

Actually, we know exactly who has been backing Brat: Brat is currently serving as the director of the "BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program" at his college. The program was founded by the former CEO of BB&T Bank, John A. Allison IV, who is also currently President of the Cato Institute. I'm not a big fan of any of these people, but I'd hardly call them "shadowy".

Although this does make one wonder, why would the Cato Institute be backing a candidate running against immigration reform as his main issue? They're theoretically libertarian, and supposedly were the brains behind GWB's immigration reform plan.

This wouldn't be the only weird contradiction about Brat - he writes about Ayn Rand a lot (probably because he's backed by a Randian), and supposedly approves of her philosophy (although he distances himself from the "Randian" label), but as a former theologian he also produced writings about how Protestant Christianity is the moral foundation of capitalism. Presumably he's disregarding all the "objective" parts of Rand's Objectivism, like her atheism.

Also, he seems to write a lot of essays denouncing crony capitalism, while working for a foundation created by a bank that took $3 billion in bailout money in 2008.

Zik-Zak:DjangoStonereaver: "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

I remember leaving this gem on an Audible "recommendation" of Atlas Shrugged on my Facebook page. Wow, do Randians get easily hurt.

Randians have no sense of humor. Read Carol Burnett talking to Larry King about playing Mrs. Wiggins in her skits with Tim Conway for the reason.

BURNETT: Yes. And the I.Q. fairy never paid her a visit. So it was great fun to play her, but it was hard because if you don't have an I.Q., you have no sense of humor. And Tim would try to get-- oh, there you see, I'm biting my nails because he's throwing ad libs at me trying to get me to laugh, and Mrs. Wiggins could never laugh. So I used to bite my fingers to keep from laughing.

anfrind:Zik-Zak: DjangoStonereaver: "There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."

I remember leaving this gem on an Audible "recommendation" of Atlas Shrugged on my Facebook page. Wow, do Randians get easily hurt.

Randianism (or as they like to call it, Objectivism) is for all practical purposes a cult. They think they understand everything about how the world works, and anything that contradicts their "understanding" is automatically and violently dismissed as blasphemy.

UrukHaiGuyz:Apparently he couldn't get by on actual knowledge of economics, which according to common sense seems violently opposed to Randian philosophy. Apparently the Cato institute has to stack economics faculties with idiots in a vain attempt to make Objectivism look sane

Considering that he has no formal education in economics, other than, possibly, a required course to get a business degree, he actually is a poster boy for Objectivist economic thought.

And this article does finally tell me why Brat gets a full professorship with a Bachelors in business, a Masters in divinity and no doctorate.

anfrind:Off the top of my head, I seem to remember that the director of the first "Atlas Shrugged" movie threatened to go Galt after it tanked in theaters. I don't recall if he eventually came back to direct the remaining two movies or if he was replaced (probably the latter, since the entire cast was different in all three movies). Either way, nobody seemed to miss him.

I think that you have to actually have money to call it "going Galt". Collecting unemployment in anonymity doesn't count.

Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are masterpieces. But if you want to understand where Ayn Rand was coming from, you have to read We The Living. I suspect most people who rip on Ayn Rand are just going with the crowd. I can't imagine someone slogging through 1000+ pages of her work and walking away hateful. That doesn't make any sense.

Arkanaut:mrshowrules: Adolf Oliver Nipples: All candidates are backed by shadowy billionaires, though to be fair his campaign spending didn't exactly demonstrate that. And why would this be scary? He destroyed a senior Republican representative and reduced his state's seniority to zero. Nobody is going to listen to him, he is powerless. And now, so is Eric Cantor.

I don't know who is backing Brat if anyone but all the money spent on an anti-immigration PSAs didn't get captured in the campaign funding comparisons between Cantor and Brat. It is almost impossible to figure which money went where anymore but to say Brat's $200K (?) was what he beat Cantor with is naive to say the least.

Actually, we know exactly who has been backing Brat: Brat is currently serving as the director of the "BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism program" at his college. The program was founded by the former CEO of BB&T Bank, John A. Allison IV, who is also currently President of the Cato Institute. I'm not a big fan of any of these people, but I'd hardly call them "shadowy".

Although this does make one wonder, why would the Cato Institute be backing a candidate running against immigration reform as his main issue? They're theoretically libertarian, and supposedly were the brains behind GWB's immigration reform plan.

This wouldn't be the only weird contradiction about Brat - he writes about Ayn Rand a lot (probably because he's backed by a Randian), and supposedly approves of her philosophy (although he distances himself from the "Randian" label), but as a former theologian he also produced writings about how Protestant Christianity is the moral foundation of capitalism. Presumably he's disregarding all the "objective" parts of Rand's Objectivism, like her atheism.

Also, he seems to write a lot of essays denouncing crony capitalism, while working for a foundation created by a bank that took $3 billion in bailout money in 2008.

Why wouldn't they be backing both?

I mean, let's start with FTFA: This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

But here's the deal, David Brat *is* backed by shadowy billionaires.

NOW.

He might have been before, but NOW he is backed by them simply because he is the Republican nominee.

MJMaloney187:Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are masterpieces. But if you want to understand where Ayn Rand was coming from, you have to read We The Living. I suspect most people who rip on Ayn Rand are just going with the crowd. I can't imagine someone slogging through 1000+ pages of her work and walking away hateful. That doesn't make any sense.

Marked as "funny." I was having a bad day until I read that and chuckled. Thanks!